


Morrígan

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [13]
Category: Irish Mythology, Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:31:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>An Irish Goddess of War and Death. She offered herself to the hero Cúchulainn three times, but<br/>he never loved her.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Morrígan

**Author's Note:**

> An Irish Goddess of War and Death. She offered herself to the hero Cúchulainn three times, but  
> he never loved her.

After the battle was over he struggled to stay standing on his own two feet. The wounds that he had taken were so terrible and still he could not, would not, die on his back like a woman birthing a babe. No, never, and absolutely not, not when he was Cúchulainn, Hound of Ulster and his Mam's own bonny, brave boy. He was himself and so no other death was possible but the one that would find him on his feet, sword in hand. When death came for him, he'd go ahead of it, like a King might. He'd dance and, in dancing, he'd leave no room for sorrow.

The pain, though. Such pain. The guts of him made a slippery belt, wrapped 'round the rock enough times to hold him up until death arrived. On and off, his head nodded. He slept, or tried to. There was an odd tremble in his chest, like the sound of something rubbing up against a wicker wall. 

There were wings in the chambers of his heart.

One time, when he woke from swooning, she was already standing beside him. Her limbs were long and pale, her teeth sharp and white. Her mouth looked bloody and her short hair was the glossy black of a crow's wing. Her eyes were the same grey as the ones in his own head. The afternoon was passing into evening.

"I know your face, girl." He croaked out the words, his mouth growing drier with every moment that brought his creeping death closer.

She reached out and brushed the sweat-damp hair back from his face. He saw fields of fire and the machineries of war when she touched him, as though those were the things that she carried with her always.

"Aye," said the skinny girl. "You do."

She'd laughed, then, tipped her head back and howled with it. There was a lot of the wolf in a sound like that and Cúchulainn felt his spine struggle to stiffen, a remnant of a primeval, prehistoric urge. He couldn't, in the end. He'd stayed slumped against the rock.

"I am pursuer and destroyer and subduer, after battle singer and the Phantom Queen of many men's hearts. I guard your death, Cúchulainn, and all of this would have been easier if you'd just loved me when you hand the chance. Do you remember me, Hound of Ulster? Now do you recall?"

And now he knew for certain why he’d seen those things when she touched him.

"Mór Ríggan," he breathed. "Morrígan."  
"You had your chance," she whispered, her lips against the side of his face. A tear slipped from one of her sky-grey eyes and left a trail in the shit and the blood on his face and she wiped it away with her thumb. "You had your choice, Cúchulainn, and you made it, and now there's nothing but the fall."

He might have wept then, for himself perhaps or for fair Ulster, if all of the water in his body hadn't been running out of his side with all of the blood. He closed his eyes instead. He waited for her to go on. She'd come here expecting to hear the sound of him falling, the Great Goddess. What kind of a Great Goddess was she, who took such joy in the failings of the likes of him? What kind of bitch was she?

He must have spoken some of it aloud, because, when he opened his eyes, she was staring right back at him with her cloud grey eyes. She was standing a little way off.

"I was not always the Goddess for you," she said, and he recalled the skinny girl with her long hair in slick braids. He remembered the stink of the cow and the sound of the switch against its back. He remembered the way that her lips had parted, and the bead of sweat that had trickled against the side of her neck, following unseen but marked pathways on her skin before disappearing into the secret place under her dress. He remembered how he'd watched it all of the way down.

"That was me, too," she said. "And you cursed me, and you sent me away. For shame, Cúchulainn. For your shame and not mine."

Under the weight of her curse, he hung his head. He didn't hear her come closer, but he felt her fingers pushing his hair into lime-stiffened creases. He felt her nails against his bare scalp and he whimpered, like a child lonesome for his mother. She cradled his head against her breasts, and he thought about the last man that he had killed and how he'd lifted the severed head by its hair in his hand. He thought about the surprising weight of a human head. His was still joined to his shoulders, but she cradled him, and he felt himself let go, and slip, and....

And the rock and the sky went on for miles and miles. His foot slid on gravel, and he shifted his weight to compensate. He needed no help to stand. The wound in his side was miraculously healed. It was a long way down from the cliffs to the waves, and there didn't seem to be anywhere flat, just a forever-stretch of rocky hills. She stood beside him, and now her hair was close shaven against her skull and her eyes were rimmed in black. She wore heavy gold in both ears and in a collar around her neck.

Below them, in the grey valley, a great many men lay dying. The sun shone reflected in helms and breastplates. Sand and grit stuck in wounds. Overhead, the black birds were circling.

"What war is this?" he asked her, but she was already stalking down the slope towards the nearest man. He hurried to keep up with her, finding little purchase in the ever shifting grit. She crouched down beside the man and rested her hand against his brow. From a little way away, it seemed that he was comforted. At the very least, his moaning stopped and his eyes closed. Morrígan reached out and curled his fingers more surely around the hilt of his sword.

"What does it matter what war this is?" she said.

“It matters,” he said, determined to keep his eyes on her face. It mattered because it had to, because wars had to be fought for a reason, and men didn’t die for nothing.

“This place is called Thermopylae,” she told him. “There were Spartans here, and all of Persia, and now there’s not much of anything at all here, is there, hero?” 

He opened his eyes. Her hair tumbled across her forehead. She had moved a little way away again, and, when she paced, he could see that she limped. There was a deep wound in her ankle. It didn't bleed, but every so often, when she moved, it seemed that he caught a glimpse of gleaming bone. There had been an eel in the stream that had wrapped around his ankle and tried to trip him, and he had dealt it a blow that cut it nearly in two. He had seen the white of its spine between red meat and slick green skin.

That was what he remembered.

He sagged, the guts wrapped him stretching to accommodate his helpless weight. His feet could no longer hold him easily, and, yet, he struggled back to them. He was a warrior, the fucking Hound of fair Ulster, and he was going to die on his feet like a warrior, not on his back like a lover or a child. He struggled to stand and she watched him.

"Keep trying, Cúchulainn," she said. "It won't be long now."

Above them, the sky was boiling, the clouds rolling in from the sea. There would be a storm. Cúchulainn tipped his head back as far as it would go, and thought about how glorious it might be to feel the rain on his face, to open his mouth and let it trickle down his throat, quench his terrible thirst and buy him, perhaps, a few more minutes of life.

She tilted her head, the motion quick and bird-like, and she reminded him more of a carrion crow that ever.

"Do you thirst, Hero?" She walked towards him, with her limp. There was a leather water-skin in her hands, so full that it overflowed, a trickle running down the side and over the back of her woad-stained hands. It was perhaps the clearest proof that he had ever seen of true divinity in the world. He nodded. The simple gesture seemed to take up much of the strength that he had left in him and he felt himself sag. She came very close, within an arm's length of him and then she tipped the waterskin and bought it to her own lips. She drank deeply, and Cúchulainn didn't know what was worse or more enticing; the slip-slide of the muscles in her throat, the heave of her breasts as she breathed through her nose, all the while swallowing more, or the thin thread of water which spilled from the corner of her mouth and ran down, dripping from her chin. When she had drunk her fill, she walked away from him again. This time, she did not limp. The skin of her calve had healed as surely as if there had never been a wound at all.

"Imagine how thirsty you might be if you were that man dying on the hot stones. Imagine that, Cúchulainn. Imagine that your lord's name was Xerxes, and that he had bought you there, to that place where nobody knew your name and there, thirsting, you lay dying. Just imagine that."

Her words meant nothing to him. They were as so much noise.

"Let me drink," he said, trying to keep his tone firm, to keep from whining and pleading. He would not beg her. He would die first. 

He would die first.

"It won't be long now," she said.

He knew that he could count what was left of his life in minutes, which did not mean that the minutes did not feel like an hour or more. Morrígan came back to him and threaded her fingers through the still warm guts circling his waist, warming her chill hands. He felt the whisper of cold against his skin, though she did not actually touch him.

"If you want me, you have only to tell me to go," he said. It was as close as he would come to asking her to release him. She looked at him for a long time, her eyes wide and expressionless as a farmyard cat's.

"It won't be long now, Cúchulainn," she said.  
"Why wait?"  
"Why ever wait?" she asked him. "Because it isn't time yet."

She tossed her head, flipping her hair back from her face, and he saw a wound that he had not noticed before, a thick cut clotted with blood across her eyebrow, narrowly missing taking her grey eye with it. There had been a wolf that had harried at the hooves of his horse and he had swung out, blind in the middle of the battle and grazed it with the point of his great sword across its flat head, and it had turned and ran, sprinkling blood, and, where the blood had fallen, red flowers had grown.

That was what he remembered.

They waited.

In time, she took the skin again and raised it to drink. This time, with a mouth full of water, she leaned in and let a little trickle from her lips to his. It was barely enough to wet his throat, and, still, he thanked her. If he'd had the strength, he would have wrapped his arms around her and held her close against his chest for a long time. When she pulled back, there was blood on her forehead, but no wound. She bent and picked up a helmet of some metal, pulling it down over her eyes like a child playing a game. She pulled the helmet down over her eyes and it became dark for him, too. It seemed that, suddenly, dark had fallen. Dark had come on very quickly, and Cúchulainn was surprised. He had expected to be long dead by nightfall. The sky had only just begun to turn red when he closed his eyes. He did not understand anything that was happening here. High above him, some light flared and cast a brightness over and between the barren landscape of the trees. It had snowed. Here and there, men huddled in holes and huffed on their hands to keep them warm. There was a moment of quiet, of peace beyond his understanding, and then the noise rose, the terrible noise, and men screaming for medics and mothers and God, and, in the middle of it all, she huddled, her arms around her knees in the shallow hole, with the tin helmet pulled down over her forehead and shadows for her eyes.

"What war is this?"  
"The second one." 

He scoffed at that, in the way of brave men. Bravery and carelessness so easily become the same thing. Brave men are sometimes also stupid. Close to him, something passed with a high pitched buzzing like a fly in a horse's ear and Morrígan reached up and dragged him down with her into her hole in the ground.

"You're already dying once," she said.

All around them, men were shouting and trees exploded into splinter and spark against the dark sky. Beneath the lip of the helmet, Morrígan's eyes had gone dark and far-dreaming.

"Like the ships," he heard her whisper as the splinters rained down on her head with a soft musical sound like tiny bells ringing. "Just like the ships are going to go."

She sounded like a child, skinny frame filled to the brim with the excitement of it all as the men shouted and then died and Cúchulainn remembered what his mother had said to him about Morrígan, the battle crow, the monster in a girl's shape.

Somewhere a few feet away from them, someone was screaming very terribly as he died.

"They bury their dead in a hole in the ground just like this one," she said, and then she hauled herself up and took off running and he lost sight of her in the darkness and the splinters and the snow and

It took him a moment to realise that she was squatted down and pissing in the already wet earth. 

"They called it ‘second’ because it came after the first one," she said, steam rising up from the ground to curl around her bare thighs and up towards her face, "and they called the first one "great" because they thought that there would never be another one like it." She straightened up and let her skirts fall back down around her legs. On one side, the plaid was stuck to her skin and stiff with blood and he wondered about that and about how a creature like her must bear many wounds. 

"Now, here is the thing about war, and about men," she said. "And I'll tell this part to you for free. There are two meanings for the word 'great', Cúchulainn. Something great might be wonderful, or it might overshadow the entire world." Her mouth tightened into an unforgiving line. "There is nothing great about war, hero, and there is nothing noble, either. War is something that has been done, that must be done, and, when it happens, I'll be there. I'll be waiting. War is, Cúchulainn. It just fucking is." 

She rubbed her hand against her thigh, the bloody patch on her skirt. He wanted to ask her what had happened. It had bled so much that it must be a terrible wound. 

"Who did that to you?" His mouth was so dry that the words had a peculiar, dry taste to them. 

She lifted up her skirt to show him where a long strip of skin and flesh and muscle had been stripped away by a blade, leaving her thigh bloody and open to the air. He was sure that it had been her ankle before but, when he looked, that wound had healed into a neat white scar.

"You did this to me," she said. 

He shook his head. 

"I have said my prayers to you, Lady," he said, his voice hoarse. He sensed the end coming closer now. "I have been a warrior my whole life. Since I could walk, you've been the only goddess that I have followed." 

She tossed her head, the movement animal-like, and squared her shoulders. There had been a column of cattle, heifers with thick red hair that had come stamping towards them, and Cúchulainn had swung his sword to clear them from the path and sliced a long strip of flank. He had joked about eating well for supper that evening, at the time. 

"What must I do to make amends?" 

"There are no amends left to be made, Cúchulainn. Yours is just to wait, now. Nothing but the fall." She lifted the water again. Surely, this time, she must let him drink. Surely, this time, she would quench his thirst for him. She lifted the skin over her head, pouring the cold, clear water over her hair, tipping her face up into the splash of it. He didn't know what was more obscene; the way her clothes soaked through and clung against her body or the waste of the water and his thirst. 

He closed his eyes. He was so thirsty that he couldn’t watch any longer. His throat ached and his lips cracked. He tasted his own blood. He felt a scatter of rain drops on his face and nearly wept. It was raining, which was a gift from someone far kinder than her. He had prayed for rain. He opened his mouth to catch a little of it on his tongue. Just a little; he wasn’t greedy, just dying of thirst. He caught the rain on his tongue and tasted salt. It was like the sky was weeping for Cúchulainn the hero. He imagined, somewhere, his wife and mother weeping too, even though they must have known that one day he would die before his time. The sky must have always known that too.

The ground beneath his feet shook and lurched and he grabbed for the rock so that he could stay standing but the rock was gone again. He lost his balance and slipped against a wooden rail. His hands were wet, but with water, not blood. He had seen the sea before, of course, but he had never been out on it, never travelled on it. Why would he, when Eire was the greatest was the greatest of all countries and gave to him everything which he could ever desire?

The sea went on forever, glass green and still until the thunder roared and the great ball of iron dropped with a smell of sulphur, sending a plume of salt water up into the air. He felt it against his skin again. All around them, men shouted and died, just as they had in the other places she had taken him . The ship turned nimbly and he stumbled again. Everything smelled of fire and salt. He knew better than to ask her where and why by then. He would receive no answer.

“Seventy percent of the earth is water,” she told him, pressed close against his wounded side, her hair wet and slicked back from her face which made her look skinny and young and feral. “And you are ninety percent water and later they’ll talk about a battle named Trafalgar, twenty seven ships to thirty three, but Trafalgar is a little way west of here and you could stand there without sinking, so who knows exactly what this place calls itself.”

Coloured flags were fluttering overhead. One of the balls slammed into the mast and it splintered with a loud crack and he ducked instinctively but the guts held him firm in place with his back against the rock and no rain was falling from the slate grey sky.

“England expects that every man will do his duty,” she said and kissed him and he didn’t know anything about any ‘England’ but he knew that his duty was nearly done. 

He tried to pull away from her but found that he didn’t have the room. His elbow hit against solid earth. He opened his eyes and, for a moment, struggled to find the right way up for the world. His perspective was wrong. It took him a moment to realise that they were lying now, pressed together in a narrow ditch dug into the sandy soil. She curled both arms around his neck and held him close. Cúchulainn lifted his head and saw a dark figure squatting near by, head bent over the book in his hands. The light in his hand glowed red. If he tilted his head and listened closely, Cúchulainn could hear him whisper.

_He went forth conquering, and to conquer._

She leaned in and kissed him, deeper this time, her tongue pressing against the seam of his aching lips. There was nothing spare on her, nothing to waste, and he found himself thinking fondly of Emer, her soft breasts and the yielding muscle of her belly. He shed a tear for the wife that he would never see again and the Goddess pulled back and touched his face gently.

“They lie down to sleep at night in holes in the ground called graves,” she told him. “They dig them themselves. When they die, they bury them in holes in the ground called graves. Which they don’t dig themselves unless they’re very unlucky.” She reached out, gathering a handful of sandy dust and scattering it over his face. It mixed with the sea-water and the tears and made dry mud.

“There was a garden here once, in this place, but the one who made it so loved the children that disappointed Him that He set fire to it, so they’d only had to lose it once.”

It smelled like something still burning.

When he opened his eyes, he wasn’t surprised to see the green hill down to the river and the rock and the blood red sky. He raised one trembling hand to his face and flaked some of the dry mud away.

"Do you not have other battlefields to attend?" he said, beginning to understand the things that she had shown him. The visions were coming quicker and quicker. He must have been closer to death than ever before. She came very close and leaned up to kiss him again. He tasted water and snow and sand on her lips. 

"All battlefields are here," she whispered, her lips moving against his. "In this moment, all heroes are you." 

He was dying now, most definitely. He could feel it coming closer with every flutter in the throbbing beat of his heart. He welcomed it; he was so weary by then. He opened his arms wide to it, and she watched him. Her eyes looked almost gentle. She reminded him of the girl who had come to him in his blankets the night before Maebh's cattle raid at Cúalnge. Slight and young she'd been, the lines of her face too strong to be called beautiful, but she'd had such kind, sad eyes. _Love me_ , she'd said to him, so quiet. _Take me to your heart, Hound of Ulster_. Be my love. But it had been that cold strange hour before the dawn when dreams were at their most powerful. Mindful of what his mother had told him about the danger of accepting what you're given in dreams, he'd closed his eyes and would not look at her again.

"I will go now," he said, as though he could make it so in the saying. 

Morrígan shook her head and smiled at him. Her eyes were red and swollen.

"Not yet," she said. "But soon."

Once more, she picked up the water. Her hands were long and white with dirt engrained under the fingernails, as though she had been digging in the wet earth. He could see blue veins beneath the skin. There were black tattoos on her skinny arms, the patterns shifting endlessly, and he thought that he could pick out birds in flight and castles and the faces of dying men. Coming very close to him, she made a cup out of one hand and poured water into it, holding it up for him to drink. The taste cut through the lingering dirty taste in his mouth. He drank and could imagine the wound in his side closing slowly, the way that hers had. All too soon her hand ran dry. She lifted the skin and poured it over his head. The water filtered down through his filthy hair, ran in rivulets along the lines of the bones of his skull and neck and shoulders. It felt so indescribably good that he began to weep. It was like being introduced to grace for the first time.

And he remembered that she had been a goddess once.

She touched him, combing her fingers back through his hair, smudging her thumb through the dirt on his face.

"You took my luck in battle from me," he managed to say. “You did this.”

She shook her head and kissed his forehead.

"No," she said, her arm curling around his neck to hold him. "Oh, no, my love. Not that at all."

He stayed still against her for a very long time. It would have taken an unimaginable effort to lift his head right then. She was very warm. He had grown so cold. She cradled the back of his head with one hand. There was a story that a woman washing bloody shirts foretold your death. He wondered what it meant when one helped you to drink, and washed the dust and the blood from your hair?

Perhaps he was already dead.

With her arms wrapped around him, she swayed to the rhythm of the far away drums. His enemies were drawing close again. If he could find the strength in his arms, he might lift his great sword one last time and make another widow or three in his battle rage. If only he could find the strength. He was a much smaller man than he had been before. He closed his eyes, his cheek resting against her chest, and he listened to the rhythm of her heart and he rose and fell with her breathing. It seemed that there was a heavy scent in the air, beyond the musk of her skin. The world after the rain. Her arms tightened around him, her arms covering his head, her chin against his hair, and he had a moment to wonder why before sound and impact and the whole world trembling beneath him, and around. There was the sound of dirt settling like rain on his head and shoulders and the rock behind him, and then the silence.

There were no birds singing. Far away, someone was crying, the high-pitched keening of a child. Cúchulainn strained to hear it past the throb of blood in his injured ears. When he opened his eyes, she was already walking away from him. The guts that had bound him to the rock were gone. The wound in his side was still open but dry. He felt stronger than he had in an hour's worth of year-long minutes. He stood and watched as Morrígan picked her way down the hillside, through the trees, to the source of the crying. 

It was a child who was crying. Cúchulainn watched as she bent down in the green ferns and lifted him, the child, no older than Cúchulainn had been when he had killed Culann's hound and ended one life, only to begin another. His mother had named him Sétanta, first.

"Come," she was calling him. "Come here, and sit with us."

The child cried, and would not be comforted.

He walked down the hill towards them, swinging his sword experimentally at undergrowth more to lift its weight than anything; more to remember the strength that it had taken to lift it, one last time.

"I was already a warrior when I was his age," he said, crouching down beside them. The child had taken very terrible wounds; one leg had been blown entirely away, his face a bloody mask in which the tears had left pale pink tracks. Cúchulainn nodded, like he understood. His mother had said that he had been too young to go, but already his warrior's heart had been beating.

When she looked up, there were pale lines in the dirt on Morrígan's face too.

"There's a school," she said, quietly, a low voice for the telling of fire-stories, "a mile over those hills, and two or three miles back that way, a village." While she was talking, she was stroking the boy's head, parting his blood and sweat damp hair with her dirty nails. The child seemed comforted, his face turned against her breast, his crying reduced to a wounded mewl. "At this time every day, he walks this way to fetch his sister from the school and bring her home to the village."

As Cúchulainn watched, another tear slipped down her cheek. Never in a million lifetimes before that moment would he have thought her a creature capable of weeping.

"What happened to him today?"

"This is the way that wars are fought now," she explained. "They bury their hate under the ground like a trap laid for a bear in the woodland. It snaps closed on whoever treads on it." She bent her head at an awkward angle and kissed the top of the child's head. "The fighting finishes, the land heals and people forget that there was ever a battlefield, but the war goes on."

Her lips pinched into a tight line of sorrow and anger. It occurred to him that she had been a Goddess once, but was no longer, so once she could have stopped this, prevented the boy's suffering altogether, and it pained her. He dropped into a crouch beside her and rested one hand on her shoulder.

"Am I dreaming this?" He had the notion that if he was dreaming and he knew that he was dreaming then it might be possible to somehow change the shape of the dream, to make it less painful for her. All of this would have been easier if he had loved her when he'd had the chance.

She looked up at him, and nodded.

"Yes," she said. "And, even as you do, it happens."  
"What must I do?" he asked her.  
"Carry the child," she said.

The boy was so light that he might as well have been made of paper or air. Cúchulainn lifted him against his chest and cradled him gently. He had a son once, who would have carried the flag of Ulster across the world. He would have wrapped this wee one, this child, in the flag of his homeland if he'd had it to hand, tattered bones and all.

He wrapped him in his cloak instead and held him. Morrígan walked ahead, her head held high, for the most part, and above them the battle birds were circling. Since he was a boy, Cúchulainn could remember the crows circling above the battlefields. Once upon a time, it had made him feel blessed to know that the Badb, Macha and the Morrígan were watching over him. Now, though, watching this sad girl in her bloody plaid pick her way down the hillside, all that the hero could feel was bone deep sorrow that there should be so slight a creature who bore the weight of the war alone. In his arms, the child twitched and wept. The stump of his leg worked uselessly, and Cúchulainn wanted to believe that the child dreamed of running though he knew from experience that the terrible wound was too recent and that the child’s sleep must be dark and silent and full of pain.

Around them, the countryside seemed to grow more familiar to him. With her plaid and her shiny black hair, her pale skin and her blue tattoos, Morrígan stood out starkly against the landscape, as starkly as a carrion bird against the blue of a summer sky. Wars were always fought in summer, wounds carried like babes into the autumn time to heal or fester. Winter was the dying time. The rain was falling from the grey sky and Cúchulainn opened his mouth and caught some of it on his tongue, and, in his arms, the child did the same. The dry wound in his side began to ache and then he saw what it was that she had been leading them to.

In the distance, a bloody man stood bound to a bloody rock. He was certainly dying. As Cuchlainn watched, Morrígan leaned in and kissed the dying man, and, sure enough, he felt her lips against his own face. She had taken him to many battlefields. It was the last that made the most sense to him. It wasn't until he looked down that he realised the child had died in his arms. He hadn't known that death could happen like that, hadn’t imagined that something could slip away so quietly into an eternal dream of running.

Morrígan came back to him, held out her arms and, for a moment, the dead child was cradled between them.

"There'll be more like him," she said and she took the child from him, folding the little body down as though it was made of so much paper and tucking him into her plaid, against her heart. She leaned up and kissed Cúchulainn on the mouth. Her lips tasted raw and bloody. "There'll always be a war."

She smoothed the side of his face fondly. He had been a warrior his whole life. For his whole life, he had been hers.

"I have been the blood of your heart and the kidneys of your valour, hero, but now it is time for me to go. You must be tired now." He was very tired. He lay down in the long grass and looked up at her, crouched over him. All of the light was behind her, and, for a minute, her hair seemed to shine like she was crowned in stars.

She kissed him in the centre of his forehead and left a bloody mark.

"I would have broken my luck to be with you, Cúchulainn," she said, softly. "Sleep now, man. Rest your head."

He closed his eyes. His side started to bleed again with a warm flood and his heart fluttered in his chest. It seemed that he heard the beating of wings. Down in the valley, with his back to the stone, the hero screamed, once, and bent his head, the weight of his corpse sagging in the looping circles of his guts. A crow landed on his shoulder and stayed.

It was a very long time before any man among his enemies was brave enough to believe Cúchulainn the hero to be dead.


End file.
